Back in the early 1980's, good reference material for space toys was almost non existant. The few books which did exist were fan made references for golden age tin robots. Hardly anything was available for plastic toys from the sixties, apart from the odd article buried in a magazine somewhere. Then in 1980, american magazine Starlog began publishing a series of limpback journals it referred to as the Photo Guidebook series. These included titles about Spaceships, Aliens, Special Effects and most notably - Science Fiction Toys and Models. For some reason, this particular guidebook is the thinnest of them all with most of the others having a good page count and a squarebound spine of about 8mm deep - whereas this one is a saddle stitched affair, not much bigger than a magazine.
However, beggars can't be choosers and it is an excellent little book, written by Mr Star Wars himself, Stephen Sansweet (although at the time, the name meant little to me!). Sansweet goes from the golden era of sace toys, with early Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon items and runs through the tin robot era into plastics and the explosion of Star Wars and related merchandise. The really great thing about the book is it features a very rare Mattel Major Matt Mason spread, Project Sword and a number of other cool plastic items.
Luckily, Major Matt gets a full page devoted to the toys and a gorgeous colour shot with the infamous vehicle riding a cable across the moon, which was never produced. Information is limited as space is at a premium, but Sansweet does give a fair about of time to some of the more memorable items and devotes the colour shots to some of the better toys.
Leafing through it in the pre-internet days of the eighties, I made regular wants lists based on some of these pages, little did I know that some scant ten years later with the advent of the internet and ebay, they would finally be within reach!
Naturally, early Star Wars toys get a good showing along with the deplorable Battlestar Galactica figures.
Project SWORDs Saturn rocket even makes an appearance, but only in black and white and with a very limited coverage.
The cover sports a Volume 1 on the title, but as far as I am aware Volume 2 was never produced. Its still available and well worth hunting down , these are just a few scans from my own copy to whet your appetite!
